Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Always Learning

Reverend Darcey Laine
February 11, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

My first year here at UUCPA, I was on the teaching team for the 1^st and 2^nd grades. We were teaching a curriculum called “Around the Church Around the Year” This curriculum helps some of our youngest children know their church better. They take walking tours, have interviews with ministers and staff, learn what a chalice is, learn about how we worship and celebrate here.

As religious Educator Maria Harris notes in her book “Fashion Me a People,” there are 3 aspects to every curriculum. The first is “explicit”; in the lesson called “chalice” we learn what a chalice is. But there is another layer called “implicit”; this is the stuff that is not written in the “lesson objectives” section, but that we learn nevertheless. We probably learn that the chalice is an object of pride to the teachers. We might learn how symbols are handled — is the chalice kept in a special place? Is it pretty? Is it clean? Is it very ordinary? Also at play is the “null” curriculum — what we learn by what is NOT said. For example in “Around the Church Around the Year”, God is never mentioned. After a few months of teaching this curriculum I began to wonder “Are we teaching that it’s not appropriate to talk about God in church?” And in fact many Sunday School teachers have asked me that same question: “Is it okay to talk about God or prayer here, or will someone get upset if I do?” People were hearing the null curriculum without either the teacher or the students having any idea what a null curriculum is.

The important point here is that we teach not only with our lesson plans and sermons, but with everything we do, with the way we do it, and with the things we do not do. For example, some people grow up thinking that a minister can’t be a woman. Do you think any of the kids in this church learned that here at this church over the past 4 years? That’s our implicit curriculum in action. I wonder if it might bear saying that “a man can be a minister too”, lest our null curriculum teach more than we intend. Whether we are conscious of what we are teaching and what we are learning, we are always doing a little of both, all through our lives.

Church life is complex. There is the worship life from Water Communion in the fall through Christmas and flower communion the CRE celebration, and back again, and all our ordinary services in between. As a community we pay attention to transitions, in rituals like weddings and memorials, and in our caring acts. There’s our work for social justice, our social life, our institutional health, fundraising, newsletters, classes, meetings.

After I’d been serving here for a few years, I was frustrated in my efforts to boil all these things down to a few essential elements — to a central theme or direction we could articulate together and set out as one following this as our north star. It was our astute lay leader Kay Pauling who finally said “Oh, you’re looking for a Grand Unified Theory for church life.” That made me feel better, because once I realized I was searching for the holy grail, I could relax about not having found it in my first few years of ministry. But now I realize that I do have a GUT for Religious Education, as compelling and incomplete as string theory:

I believe with Unitarian Religious Educator Sophia Fahs that “The religious Life is the deep life.” So I hypothesize that to find the Grand Unified Theory, the GUT of the thing, you go deeper and deeper until you reach the point where everything actually is one. Go so deep that there is not even the distinction of “this is a religious life and that is not” or “this is me but that is not me.” The belief in such a level of being is, to my mind, the essence of both the Unitarian tradition — the one-ness of God, and the Universalist tradition — the one-ness of our common plight.

From this primal unity different traditions leave that one-ness in different ways. We Westerners like duality. Good and bad, right and wrong, us and them, male and female, black and white. I need more color than that, like the 7 colors of the Hindu chakra system in which the self is divided into 7 parts, each represented by a different color of the rainbow, and each representing a different level or layer of the human self. Another metaphor for looking at this multiplicity would be Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. He wanted to create a work of art that was music and words and drama and costume and dance and visual art. He wanted to be making art on as many levels as possible; the total artwork. I want the whole of my life to achieve that kind of unity. In most of our lives those people who tend to be good at compassionate care are separated in their jobs from those who can design computer chips, from those who compose music, from those who run corporations. And in any specialty, certain parts of ourselves are gifts and certain parts of our selves are liabilities. I want something different for us when we come to church. I want someone who never had music lessons to get a chance to sing. I want people who are stuck behind computers all week to get a chance to move. I want people who do too much to have a chance to be quiet. I want people who are lonely to be connected. I want that wholeness for us, and the balance required to achieve that wholeness.

I want church to be a balancing force in our lives. I want church to remind us that we are not just that part of ourselves that we say when we first introduce ourselves: “I’m Darcey, I’m a minister at this church.” But what is hinted at with the Hindu greeting namaste: “The divine in me meets the divine in you.” For me this means something like “the whole of me greets the whole of you” or “I greet you in the layer of being where we are not separate.”

That is to say, as a Universalist, I believe that no one comes into this world cut off from their one-ness. We are all part of this amazing unity that is life, though sometimes it’s easier to remember that than other times. I believe therefore, I take the Universalist leap, that true religion must be accessible to each and every person. The religious life, life on the deepest level is by this definition something that every living being is connected to. Living a religious life is about our attempt to renew that connection to our one-ness with all that is. As Unitarian Universalists, we also tend to believe that things that happen here in this room during worship are no more or less sacred than the regular stuff of life. Because life itself is pretty miraculous, especially new life bursting into the world, or those moments of profound connection, the flamboyant color of a flower, the architecture of a tree, the evolution of civilizations. It’s all amazing.

My seminary professor Rebecca Parker links this to the tradition of “revealed eschatology.” This means that everything we are searching for is within this reality in which we are living. This is very Universalist, but not just Universalist, we share this with other varied traditions. Revealed Eschatology is to say, the point of our lives is not to get into heaven, whether in the clouds or by meeting production and sales quotas. The point of our lives is to really live our own life, as authentically, as holistically and deeply as possible.

I believe with Harris that “We teach by how we are.” Every minute of every day we are learning and we are teaching.

Therefore we teach and learn the religious life, in our intention as we are living it every day.

This is the litmus test for religious education as far as I am concerned — are we teaching in a holistic way. Are we teaching in a way that embodies the wholeness of self? In a lecture on education I heard during my sabbatical, Matthew Fox asked “Are we teaching to all 7 chakras?” Usually we, as a culture in traditional education, we are not. And when we come to church, we are still mostly used to using the parts of ourselves that we use at work or at school. It’s comfortable, it’s what we know best even if it leaves us undernourished sometimes.

So when kids come here on Sunday mornings, we have to work hard to get ourselves out of that school paradigm. If they are trained in religious literacy, then we feel sure that they are learning. They know about Tu B’shevat is, and something about Judaism. They know what Noah’s pudding is, and something about Islam. But my deepest fear about the nature of Sunday School, not just here at UUCPA, but in the programs across denominations, across the world, is that what the kids are also learning is that what is valued in religious community is the same as at school; sitting still, remembering things, using language, using a pencil. This does not match what I know of the religious life, and what I know of God.

It is true that the Scholar Karen Armstrong says that she feels closest to God when she is studying scripture. But that’s not the most common way that I hear us even in this church explaining our own lives. We feel awe when we see the beauty of Yosemite. We experience the deep life when we sit with one who is dying, when someone extends a caring hand to us. One of my friends at University of Creation Spirituality said she felt close to God playing softball. We know about the power of music. We know the power of a good political rally. We were blown away to see the dream of the Opportunity Center, which we helped to build, become manifest in our own community.

I am so afraid that a child who does not excel in school, who wiggles and says the wrong answer, will get the idea that the religious life is not for her, because what she would rather do is run as fast as she can through a field feeling the open sky above her, or climb a tree. I would hate to see a boy learn that the religious life is not for him, because he can’t keep up with the back and forth of the classroom discussion, and would rather sit quietly with a sketchbook.

Or let’s think about our adults. By the time you are established in your profession, you know where you belong, and probably where you don’t belong. We like for work to stay at work, and church to stay at church. But think about it; if we are really committed to living out our search for meaning in our lives and in our communities, we need to integrate our knowledge.

For example, Unitarians were on the cutting edge breaking the barrier between religion and science, and often getting in trouble for it. But I think too many scientists leave their understanding of the mechanics of reality at work. I think of what Emerson wrote in his essay “Nature” that (to paraphrase) the mind cannot even conceive of anything it hasn’t seen in nature. That nature provides the framework of our language and thought.” Before I told a story about the refraction of light into a rainbow to make a point about our rainbow year, I checked in with one of our local scientists to make sure that my metaphor reflected not only poetry but reality. But I wonder if some people are timid about talking science, because they work in a different field, and are afraid of mis-speaking or being judged. We talk about this flame every week, but I wonder how much more there is to know about fire, and how a knowledge of the physical realities of fire could tell us about our reality on many levels.

I don’t want anyone to be afraid to jump into the discussion, the learning, because they know their proper box, which is social work, or art, or some other branch of science. I want us to support one another on our search, knowing that each is at a different place on the journey, with a different stretch of road behind and ahead of them. But all can be enriched by understanding that fire is not an object but a process, Perhaps it could set us wondering (with the process theologians) if God might be a process rather than an object? Or what about our own selves? The more fully we use our capacities, the more we risk learning in areas where we are not certified and approved, the more fully we will know this life.

I live in mortal fear that one of our members, whether adult or child, will hear from us, from some off-handed thing we say, or the way we structure a class, that the religious life is not for them. Because they are a jock, or a nerd, or a flake, or a socialite. That they will hear us saying “no” when the most important thing I want our children to hear is “yes.”

Well, of course sometimes NO is the thing to say.
No; that thing you said to Jimmy hurt his feelings, and that’s not how we are together here at church.
No; that war you started in Iraq needs to end now.
NO; the Boreal forest in Canada cannot be logged for catalogue paper, it is needed for the wholeness of our living eco-system.

Yes, I want to say — you can learn from all that is happening around you.
Yes, the things you do and say are powerful, so powerful that they are teaching others right now.
Yes, even your teachers can’t see the whole of this amazing life, so speak up if you see a piece that is hidden from us.

Now think of the statement of purpose of our church “to support one another in the free and loving search for spiritual meaning, and to the living out of that meaning in our lives.” We are on this search for meaning not just while we are here in the Main Hall, in an Adult RE class, or over in Sunday School, we are also on this search on the patio over coffee, in the parking lot, and back at work on Monday morning. One mother told me she left her childhood church because what they taught in the Sunday School Classroom and what she experienced in church life didn’t agree. She saw no value in being part of a church where people didn’t walk their talk.

You are heading into an exciting time, as you look for a new professional religious Educator to guide the learning of this congregation. But don’t for a moment think that he or she will be the only educator in this congregation. All of us are teaching with everything we do and say. We teach with the kinds of plants we plant here on campus, with how we clean the floors, how we shape our budget, what kind of coffee we drink, how we mobilize for justice, how we witness times of transition, how we stand in awe of the miracles of life.

I took a class from Rebecca Parker when I was at Starr King called “Watching over the Love.” We were all automatically enrolled. At the first session, a colleague asked “Is this course required?” Rebecca responded “It’s not required, but it’s not optional either.”

So it is with all religious education.

We are always teaching.

We are always learning.

Simply because we are.

Simply because we are, at the deepest level, connected to all that is.

 

Reflection: 65 Years of Religious Education by Phyllis Cassel